Longtime educator running for Live Oak school board as an advocate for students and teachers

LIVE OAK -- Phyllis Greenleaf has spent much of her life working to improve education, promoting the idea of teaching to the whole child in the numerous college classes she has taught on child development and learning.

Now she hopes to take that knowledge and bring it to a new venue: the Live Oak School District Board of Trustees.

Greenleaf is vying for one of three four-year seats on the board along with current board member Heather Rhodes and Jeremy Ray, a fire captain in Santa Clara.

"I'm not running for the board -- I'm walking," Greenleaf jokes.

As part of her campaign, she and friends have been going door to door to as many residences in the district as they can to introduce herself.

A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard University in Massachusetts, Greenleaf worked as a substitute teacher at public schools there before returning to her native California. Her academic focus was on early childhood education and development, and she had a long career teaching college courses on those subjects before moving to Live Oak in 2005 so she and her 97-year-old mother could be closer to the ocean.

The state of California and the nation's schools have her troubled, and have largely inspired her desire to run for the school board.

"California's economy has so hurt our schools," Greenleaf said. "We need to be an advocate for the children, the parents and the teachers."

She said she has worked as advocate in a variety of ways and would bring that to the table if she's elected.

"If I have to go knocking on the doors of every organization in California to get the funding for the Live Oak School District, I will," she said. "I will be an advocate."

Also important to her is the way education in the U.S. has become so focused on standardized testing through initiatives such as No Child Left Behind.

"You can't judge a school or a teacher on the basis of a test score," she says. "Education is so much more complex than that."

It's a topic she feels so passionate about that in 2006, she self-published a book through the site www.lulu.com called "I'd Rather Be Learning: How Standardized Testing Leaves Learning Behind and What We Can Do."

"Learning should be exciting and challenging -- it shouldn't be a rote thing," she said. "All children can become great readers."

It's the joy and importance of learning that has influenced her longer-term goals for the district, inspiring her to run for a four-year spot on the board rather than a two-year one.

She hopes to be able to help promote and increase bilingual education for all in the district, and would work to obtain grants for bilingual curriculum. She believes celebrating and honoring the diversity of our children is essential, and that there is great value that comes from learning about other's cultures.

Greenleaf has done leadership and diversity training through the state, and that's inspired a lot of her own teaching. She hopes to be able to support teachers in this and bring their ideas more to the forefront.

Aside from running her school board campaign, the Los Angeles native is active in learning Spanish and stand-up paddle boarding, practicing Tai Chi and yoga, and walking her dog, as well as providing care for her mother, who lives in Pleasure Point.

A grandmother of two, she also believes she could help bring more of the senior community into the schools, to serve as volunteers, mentors and tutors -- as she herself has done through the after-school program at Green Acres Elementary School.

"I think advocacy can be fun," she said. "You get to know your community and your neighbors."